0.14.1, tracking change detection, and more rendering examples - This Week in Bevy

thisweekinbevy...
0.14.1 is out, Bevy Jam 5 voting is ongoing for another week, and there's plenty of submissions to showcase this week.
track_change_detection is probably my favorite merged feature this week alongside some new quality-of-life APIs, and a fantastic new example for mid-level rendering APIs. I'm a huge fan of new rendering examples because even when Bevy's rendering changes, the examples are always kept up to date as a solid resource.
We see a bunch of game jam submissions showcase'd this week. They will be mentioned in the issue if the author's chose to showcase their work but we won't be covering games in depth until after voting has closed.

[@bluspur]

That was a wonderful round up, thank you! I can already see some utilities for the new change detection source tracking. I am also really happy to see so much variety in the games being made for the jam this year, especially 3d games. I wish I could have taken part as well, but I didn't want to lose my train of thought on my own project. Also thank you for your work maintaining becy_ecs_tilemap, I love that crate, and I wouldn't be nearly as far into my own game without it.

[@morgomi]

05:55 very interesting game!

[@iglobrothers645]

I really love bevy... I wanna try using and learning it. But there's just such a high initial barrier. I instead opted for a middle ground. Godot just didn't really fit me using GDScript because everything becomes spaghetti with all the loosely typed and magic string referenced things. Now I switched to c# with Godot and I love it. Way more structured architecture and I spend more time in the code editor and mostly use the godot editor for UI. I really would love to somehow get into bevy tho.

[@jesperpersson9388]

The reasons why I decided to move away from Godot with C# is that the community as a whole and the core developers sort of look down on C# for some weird reason. The community (if you engage with them) will always pester you about "why don't you just use GDScript, it's so good". Then if you run into performance issues with how C# interfacing is implemented in Godot the core developers will ask you "why don't you just use C++ for the heavy stuff". Of course you cannot mix C# and C++ well since you have to generate the bindings yourself for C# in that case. The engine is made to be used with GDScript and C++ for the performant parts. Trying to fight that assumption just leads to frustration IME.
Then you realize that C# only makes up 20% of the Godot community. The Godot community is 5 times as big as the Bevy community (looking at Discord members) so that means the Bevy community and the Godot C# community are roughly the same size. An issue though with the Godot C# community is that the patterns how to code larger systems in Godot have not been discovered yet. There is a lot of research ongoing, especially with ChickenSoft, but at the end of the day it's not a solved problem. Bevy OTOH has a scalable architecture laid out for you from the start, although as you say it's complicated to get a hang of. I definitely struggle a lot more with Bevy than Godot although I'm much more experienced in Rust than C#.
I'm not saying this to dissuade you from using Godot C#. It's a fairly practical and productive choice unlike the current version of Bevy. I just don't see it being a good long term choice for myself in the way many people say "Godot is the future of game development". I think it's overhyped.

[@iglobrothers645]

@@jesperpersson9388 I definitely like Godot more than Unity or unreal but I can notice that it's just plain impossible to design something with a nice overseeable architecture

[@iglobrothers645]

@@jesperpersson9388 what I would be interested in tho is where the architectural problem has been solved for bevy? I mean I currently reference ChickenSoft a lot but I can't find any "opinionated" replacement for it for bevy. I'd love to have some sort of helping wheels to get started.

[@chrisbiscardi]

What would help you get over that initial barrier? and what do you find hard about getting started?

[@iglobrothers645]

@@chrisbiscardi Maybe you can take a look at ChickenSoft and their blog about architecture design, as well as their demo game Implementing the theory. I've had a lot of fun reading through it and learning from their steps. Something like that would immensely help for bevy. (Essentially the demo game implements a clean architecture, with a splash screen, main menu, settings, save/load, loading screens, event handling, game state management, player controllers, world loading, etc)

[@auralluring]

ahhhh surviving today being in here is so cool (as part of the team)